YC: Please, criticize my startup!
Here is the deal - we're building an instant answer portal. We're targeting to clients who need to get an instant multiple answers to their problem or a question (say, within 60 minutes time frame). This will cost money (client's budget), that will be split over the subscribers, who will answer the questions. One of the key points, that makes it interesting for market research groups, is that we'll be able to generate more then one answer for one question. So here comes the major question - while it's pretty transparent and kind of motivating for subscribers, how do you think this is interesting for clients? What target group of clients do you think we may be interesting for? What kind of a questions do we sound like a great niche? I have my own answers, but they're definitely not enough (one of the reasons why we're developing this portal :). Just give me any feedback, either positive or negative. Please, drop me a line if you see this either as a perspective startup or a looser. THANKS!
39 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadI'm not saying it can't be done effectively and profitably--it probably can. We used SitePoint for a logo contest recently and had a half dozen professional designers, and another couple dozen serious amateurs, who responded over the course of 10 days...the prize was $500, though, so not chump change. We were extremely happy with the resulting logo, and we all (designers included) had a lot of fun with the contest.
But you might consider focusing on a few niches to get started, and actually line up experts on retainer just to prove to people that you have a working system (we've seen Google, Yahoo, and a dozen also-rans come and go in this field...most people are not going to believe that a startup can make something work that all of the big names in internet tech have failed to deliver). I believe you're going to have to prove it, but I might be wrong...maybe you can just let it run and gather momentum slowly.
The other problem is that most of the high end questions and answers I've seen (the ones where you'll make your money) on similar services have been extremely vague and, in result, poorly answered. I got a strong feeling that the questioner probably wasn't going to be very satisfied with the answers. Quality is historically very low from these kinds of services, and it's hard for me to imagine how you'd solve that problem without a lot of (expensive) oversight.
my friends on gtalk/yelp/google
furthermore, i would never in a million years think of paying for the answer to a question such as "which color shirt do i wear" or "where do i shop for X".
i have a brain, and the internet offers answers to those questions for free, and it doesn't take an hour.
Don't forget that if you know where is the best retail store close by, some people don't, and they are not that happy to invest hours looking for it.
Speaking about my example with shirt/club/etc, these are really bad examples, saying about paid questions; but they are good if they'd be free (and they would).
However, just a silly example. I'd like to buy a gaming console, but I don't know which one. I have close to 100 of active contacts in my IM, but barely few of them know something about gaming consoles. So I'm about to spend several hundred dollars, and (me, personally) would be happy to spend $10 or $20 in advance to gather opinion of 50 or 100 people about the gaming consoles before making a purchase. And I want it now. Not tomorrow. Not after the week of gathering all pros and cons.
even when it was paid, google answer didn't gain traction. you need an even more vigilant and coherent audience in order for answers to be replied to within 60 minutes. the technical challenges aside (which, really, this site sounds cloneable within a weekend), this is just a chicken and egg problem.
What game console do I buy? Well, the one my friends have, so we can trade games and play against each other! What club? The one my friends go to...we like the same music (roughly), and have the same general style...we probably even like the same kinds of girls. So, IM is infinitely more valuable than the service you describe even if only one or two friends are active right now. If it's not expertise that you're brokering, you've got nothing of value, as far as I can tell.
A Google search about game consoles will turn up thousands of random opinions from strangers about just about any subject (particularly game consoles, but clubs also get talked about, etc.), so without some sort of expertise, you're just doing a really inefficient and slow Google search.
Now, I'm not saying brokering expertise is an easy business, but I can at least see value in it. I can't think of any good use cases for a dedicated "trivial questions with easy answers" system.
I'm happy to be wrong. Maybe you should build a prototype this weekend and see how people react...you'd probably be able to get some media for it, since all of the big answers services have been shutdown or shuffled off into a corner to die quietly. If it looks cool, you'd be able to get a crunch and maybe some hits from design blogs. If you use a funny language (Smalltalk or Erlang or something) you can get some hits from that. It costs nothing but time to try it.
But, it's not an idea I would be willing to invest any time in. (Although, I did just invest fifteen minutes or so in my various responses to your query about it.) ;-)
"trivial answers with easy questions" just sounds like a slow google, nothing i would be excited about using, and certainly nothing i would pay for.
that being said, i dont think your idea is horrible at all, but simply that i think you need to spend some time refining it.
someone mentioned a site that helps people answer very difficult, expensive questions, the exact opposite of what you're looking for.
explore that avenue. spend a day reading about google answers and why they died. really, if i were you, i would spend the next week doing nothing but looking at other sites that failed or are failing and ask 'why' and 'what can i do better?'.
it sounds like you've done that a bit, but as you can see from the wonderful amount of criticism you've received, you could probably stand to do a lot more research and thinking about the problem.
i personally think you're on to something, but just need to rethink it a bit.
and btw, dont write off google so quickly. search for "xbox 360 vs ps3" and within .5 seconds you'll have more information about which console to buy than your service could hope to offer in a full day of responses.
What's to prevent a guy from GM from signing on to answer questions and advising every single one of your questioners to buy a Chevy truck?
More importantly, if your site tells me to buy a Chevy truck, how do I know that I'm not a victim of product placement?
At least when I read competing ads for game consoles I know the bias of everyone involved. And reading ads is free!
Why would I want to pay you to tell me what nightclub to go to, what color shirt I should wear, or what I should buy for my girlfriend?
Those are things that either a) I should already know or b) I would find out from my friends and family.
The email address in your profile doesn't show up to the public, you've gotta reenter it in the about: field if you want other people to be able to see it.
Just curious... which {language,framework,hosting}?
If you have plenty of good, inexpensive answerers then you wouldn't need to.
After the first page, it's basically a list of old questions and answers -- so reading over the first hundred or so might give you a good idea of what the market is for this service.
It sounds like you're offering an answer service with a deadline, which is great, because now all you have to do is figure out what kind of questions people will ask, how to attract the people who can answer them, how to compensate everyone, and how to outcompete much larger rivals who can duplicate your entire product over their lunch break, while taking advantage of their existing network. Sounds pretty surefire!
2. S&P runs a service called Vista Research. They've built a stable of experts in various vertical markets, and they've cultivated an advisory client list. So the clients come in with crazy questions about things impacting their business or investment decisions and S&P hooks them up with the Expert to answer. The Experts bill the client, and S&P also bills the client as a subscriber with access to all the experts. (I'm an 'expert' and get a question once a month or so. It's never turned into business for our company yet though.) Theirs is a super-premium service for people making $million decisions. It's also heavily manual. Recruiting experts, selling clients, matching clients to experts, etc. Maybe there's some web2.0 optimization of that niche to be had.
This kind of idea is hard to evaluate up-front. Sometimes you just have to build it and see but I think you could be onto something.
If you do it, try to integrate visual ways of showing that the app is working, and spend effort on getting that key first answer incredibly fast. Another question to ask yourself is if you want someone to wait and watch the answers come in, or if they'll come back in an hour to see what came in. That decision is crucial to how you build the app.
This article might be of interest: http://www.seo24.org.uk/how-yahoo-or-facebook-could-really-k... Most isn't relevant, but skip down to the text "Think of it this way - today's search engines answer three basic questions:"
It's talking about exactly the problem you're solving, and the value you're providing. Hope that helps and all the best with the idea!
We built something similar, but our focus has been on gathering votes quickly rather than answers. Personally I think something magical that happens when an app crosses over into being truly (and visually) real-time.
- aaron
As I explained in a recent blog post (http://www.ideatagging.com/a-facebook-and-yahoo-partnership-...), after search, questions are the next best thing for detecting users' intent and therefore are a good basis for tageted ads. So my advice, much as it pains me to say it, is to ditch the paying users idea and instead focus on ad revenues.
By the way, I have some interesting angles on the whole questions and answers thing. Contact me via my blog (link above) and I would be happy to share. Good luck.